Ekologija

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genocide-coming-but-its-worse-than-that.html?utm_source=tw

UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.
By David Wallace-Wells

...
As recently as a year ago, when I published a magazine cover story exploring worst-case scenarios for climate change, alarmism of this kind was considered anathema to many scientists, who believed that storytelling that focused on the scary possibilities was just as damaging to public engagement as denial.
...

Because the numbers are so small, we tend to trivialize the differences between one degree and two, two degrees and four. Human experience and memory offers no good analogy for how we should think about those thresholds, but with degrees of warming, as with world wars or recurrences of cancer, you don’t want to see even one.

At two degrees, the melting of ice sheets will pass a tipping point of collapse, flooding dozens of the world’s major cities this century. At that amount of warming, it is estimated, global GDP, per capita, will be cut by 13 percent. Four hundred million more people will suffer from water scarcity, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. It will be worse in the planet’s equatorial band. In India, where many cities now numbering in the many millions would become unliveably hot, there would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long and exposing, in total, 93 times more people. This is two degrees — practically speaking, our absolute best-case climate scenario.

At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought. The average drought in Central America would last 19 months and in the Caribbean 21 months. In northern Africa, the figure is 60 months — five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sextuple in the United States. Beyond the sea-level rise, which will already be swallowing cities from Miami Beach to Jakarta, damages just from river flooding will grow 30-fold in Bangladesh, 20-fold in India, and as much as 60-fold in the U.K. This is three degrees — better than we’d do if all the nations of the world honored their Paris commitments, which none of them are. Practically speaking, barring those dramatic tech deus ex machinas, this seems to me about as positive a realistic outcome as it is rational to expect.

At four degrees, there would be eight million cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone. Global grain yields could fall by as much as 50 percent, producing annual or close-to-annual food crises. The global economy would be more than 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change, and we would see at least half again as much conflict and warfare as we do today. Possibly more. Our current trajectory, remember, takes us higher still, and while there are many reasons to think we will bend that curve soon — the plummeting cost of renewable energy, the growing global consensus about phasing out coal — it is worth remembering that, whatever you may have heard about the green revolution and the price of solar, at present, global carbon emissions are still growing.
...

To avoid warming of the kind the IPCC now calls catastrophic requires a complete rebuilding of the entire energy infrastructure of the world, a thorough reworking of agricultural practices and diet to entirely eliminate carbon emissions from farming, and a battery of cultural changes to the way those of us in the wealthy West, at least, conduct our lives. And we need to do all of that in two, or possibly three, decades. As a comparison, simply the last phase of the recent three-stop extension of New York City’s Second Avenue subway line took 12 years. All told, from the first groundbreaking, the project took 45 years.

That is not to say it’s over or we’re doomed. Stalling warming below four degrees is better than surpassing it, keeping temperatures below three is better still, and the closer we get to two degrees the more miraculous. That is because climate change isn’t binary, and doesn’t just kick in, full force, at any particular temperature level; it’s a function that gets worse over time as long as we produce greenhouse gases. How long we continue to is, really, up to us, which is to say it will be determined in the province of politics, which is to say public panic like that produced by the IPCC report can be a very productive form of policy pressure.
...

The principal negative environmental impacts of small hydropower plants in Turkey

S. Baskaya1*, E. Baskaya2 and A. Sari3

1Faculty of Forestry, Department of wildlife Ecology and Management, Karadeniz Technical University, 61080, Trabzon, Turkey.

2Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Forest Engineering Program, Karadeniz Technical University, 61080, Trabzon, Turkey.

3General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works, 24, Region Directory, Örnek District, 36100, Kars, Turkey.

Accepted 30 May, 2011

There has been a substantial increase in recent years in the number of small hydropower plants (SHP) as an alternative renewable energy source. SHPs are plants which have a capacity of 0.5 to 25 MW and are subject to the environmental impact assessment procedures different from those of other plants in Turkey. There are 903 small hydropower plants in the country including those with a license application under evaluation, those in the process of construction or production. The number of the plants is ever increasing with the newly developed projects. While offering ecological advantages from a global perspective, SHPs may cause some environmental impacts at the local and regional level. In the present study, 40 SHPs (4 in the process of production, 22 under construction, 14 with an application under evaluation) were investigated and evaluated on site and some recommendations made.

Small hydropower projects have the potential to bring electricity to millions of people now living off the grid. But experts warn that planners must carefully consider the cumulative effects of constructing too many small dams in a single watershed.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/as_small_hydropower_expands_so_does_caution_on_its_impacts

But hydropower’s benefits have come at a cost. In June 2013, early and extraordinarily heavy monsoon rains fell for two days, streaming off Uttarakhand’s mountainsides, overflowing its rivers, and overwhelming scores of new dams. The flooding eventually killed almost 6,000 people, tore up 1,300 roads, took out nearly 150 bridges, and destroyed 25 small hydropower projects. The disaster seemed an act of God, but a government-commissioned said much of the blame lay elsewhere — on the new hydroelectric power infrastructure, which included nearly 100 dams, many of them smaller than 25 megawatts in capacity.

The secret tactics used by global chemical giant Monsanto, to protect its billion-dollar business and its star product, the weed killer, Roundup.

xie saike wrote:u turskoj svest kao u srbiji, mada tamo su to isto odluke sprege politicara i investitora. ili situacija sa zivotnom sredinom u istanbulu gde je erdogan javne zelene povrsine sveo na 2%, doduse tamo to ima i cisto bahate politicke uzroke, jer je ukidanjem parkova ukinuo i prostore za okupljanja i socijalizaciju ljudi.

Canada, the second largest producer of uranium, will boost its reliance on nuclear energy to reduce its carbon footprint and will encourage other nations to do the same, public broadcaster CBC said Thursday.

The move would mark a change in the climate strategy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government unveiled just last December, which did not mention nuclear energy.

Instead of growing feed for livestock, the report says, cattle should be grazed on a rotational system that has the potential to make pastures both more productive and able to sequester carbon. Livestock should be fed “ecological leftovers,” or the scraps humans leave behind—food waste and crop stubble—instead of what has been specifically grown for them.

бламберг wrote:the Climate, Land, Ambition & Rights Alliance has presented its own self-described “radical” plan to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

If Bitcoin is adopted at rates similar to other technologies, like credit cards, it could increase global temperatures by two degrees Celsius by 2033 according to a study published on Monday in Nature Climate Change. https://t.co/8Emh9Bixca

Libertarian goldbugs gonna kill us.

— Charlie Stross (@cstross) October 30, 2018

Bomba je pronađena kod kuće u kojoj su smešteni izvođači radova. U toku je istraga, u toku su i međusobne optužbe ko je postavio. Sve vreme, u toku su i pokušaji meštana da spreče nastavak radova, zbog čega je juče došlo do sukoba sa privatnim obezbeđenjem.

BY MIRANDA HART
NOVEMBER 22, 2018

Desiccants kill more than plants. Herbicides like glyphosate also kill bacteria. You could just as easily call them “antibiotics.” Our gut bacteria are sensitive to antibiotics, which is why we should avoid eating herbicides. When our microbes are healthy, our immune system is stable. But when microbes are disturbed, diseases like obesity, Alzheimer’s, or celiac disease can result.

Long-term exposure to antibiotics results in lasting shifts in gut microbiota. Cattle are fed low dose antibiotics in feedlots—not to stave off disease, but because it makes them gain weight more easily than an antibiotic-free cow. It changes their gut microbes so that they grow fat on less food. A study from March this year showed that glyphosate exposure changed the composition of honeybee gut microbes, which could make the bees more susceptible to colony collapse.6

Herbicides are particularly dangerous for gut microbes because they’re poorly absorbed by the gut. Low absorption means that gut bacteria are subjected to prolonged contact with the herbicide as it passes through the digestive system. Ironically, poor absorption is part of the reason that herbicides are deemed safe enough to put on our food.

“We don’t actually know what happens when gut microbes are exposed to herbicides,” Deanna Gibson tells me. She studies the interaction between diet, gut microbes, and disease at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Her lab is a hive of researchers from around the world homogenizing frozen poop samples and mice guts. “It’s shocking to me that the chemicals we feed to lab mice to disrupt gut function are actually common herbicides—like glyphosate,” Gibson says. “How are we not talking about this as a society?”

Part of the answer is that neither Health Canada nor the U.S. EPA consider herbicides as antibiotics. This means that their safety assessments do not consider effects on human gut microbes. There have been no explicit tests of the effect of desiccation on our microbiome. The only studies that exist consider rats, cattle, bees, and turtles—because it is unethical to test the effects of toxins on humans.

Plus, there is other stuff in herbicides that is dangerous for both animals and microbes.  Commercial herbicides are cocktails of chemicals that include herbicidal agents and chemicals that improve their delivery. These “adjuvants” include petroleum byproducts, neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors. Adjuvants help the herbicidal penetrate the thick, waxy layer that surrounds plant cells, making them good for breaching bacterial cell walls, too. But adjuvants are not subjected to the same regulation as herbicides, and are considered “inert” without much evidence. Desiccation means adjuvants are being applied to edible crops in large quantities (as opposed to weeds, their original target).  Their toxicity has not been studied.

So what can we do?  To begin, we need to clearly determine how much glyphosate the human population is exposed to. My lab has started to do this—but it’s not easy. How much glyphosate are we exposed to? We can estimate residues in foods, but what about in the water table? Indirect exposure through agricultural and forestry use? Then we need to begin the difficult task of evaluating that risk, through animal models, and correlational studies in humans. This will not be easy, or fast.

On my way home from Shewchuk’s farm, I stopped by a desiccated pea field. It was a clear afternoon, but the air was heavy with dust, casting an orange glow on the field. Four combines, each as big as a small building, were kicking up dirt and chaff from the peas while two enormous semi-trailers waited to receive the seeds. At least a dozen hawks circled overhead, waiting for the rodents that were now exposed on the bare ground. I knew agriculture had changed, but I couldn’t have imagined this scene so divorced from the mom and pop farms of my childhood. The scene was from some dystopia. I was reminded of a famous quote by Alanis Obomsawin: “When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted … you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”

But what if we can’t eat our own food, either?

If herbicide sales have topped out, why not encourage pre-harvest spraying, and sell twice the product? In business circles, this is called increasing “use patterns.”

Uzgoj popularnog voća, koje primjerice u Velikoj Britaniji predstavlja proizvod na kojem vlasnici trgovačkih lanaca najviše zarađuju, uz pamuk troši više agrokemikalija od bilo koje druge kulture. Osim zatrovanog i monokulturnim uzgojem osiromašenog okoliša, bananizacija Ekvadora, Hondurasa, Kostarike ili afričkih zemalja često donosi i kršenje radničkih prava. No, “potrošači u EU imaju moć promijeniti stvari”, ističe Jacqui Mackay iz organizacije Banana Link.